Murk's blog

By Murk, history, 5 years ago, In English

Well, I'm a senior year student, and obviously I'm not an adept in competitive programming (I tend to read a lot but my practice intensity is pretty low), anyway, being a senior undergraduate I picked up a cryptography-wise thesis, and it has brought to my attention that cryptography and competitive programming are really joint (by mathematical means), Many interesting theories and concepts founded in algebra and number theory are shared between CP and cryptography, of course that's neither a good reason to practice CP nor a good reason to drift into cryptography world, but what I'm saying is, CP did significantly contributes to an easier understanding of mathematical foundations and concepts of cryptography, perhaps CP-mathematics relation are much more bigger than cryptography, much bigger than Olympiad and similar competitions, it really annoys me the "I didn't come here to do math" "Mathforces" kinda comments (especially from core programmers), Well, I do understand that math is just a one topic of many other topics, but how exactly math is irrelevant to CP?, it is not really wise to say "I'm just not good at math" as an excuse, even research doesn't support such claims, math is indispensable part of CP, ok let me stop here as I'm not here mainly to address such issue, I just noticed many tasks here on codeforces inspired by ciphers and crypto, i would like to hear from people involved in such topics, what do you think of the relation between CP and mathematical cryptography?

and perhaps some advice for me and others :)

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By Murk, history, 6 years ago, In English

it may seem as a strange suggestion, but I would argue that showing the number of people solved a problem can affect your perception of the problem, in other words, it may force you to prejudge the problem difficulty,some people may say only 100 people solved the problem! it must be a difficult problem let's avoid it, others may say 40k people solved the problem, it must be naive boring problem, why isn't there an optional feature to hide the number of people solved a problem same as for tags, it is no big deal, but I think it would be nice to add such feature, and I think problem level (A-B-C-D-E...) could be enough, and it will be your choice anyway

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By Murk, history, 6 years ago, In English

There is something unclear to me about problem 900B Position in Fraction in the first test case , the input given is 2 3 7 and the output given is -1 the output doesn't make since, as for dividing 2/3, the result is 0.666667, am I missing something ?

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By Murk, history, 6 years ago, In English

I don't know whether many others encountered with this problem or not, but for me at least, I notice that the official tutorials made for the contests aren't clear or easy to understand enough, although they are written to help and improve the beginners in the first place, they do not really stand for that, with all respect to the writers , sometimes I notice that the writer jumps from point n to n+2 and the reader has to guess the missing points on his own, sometimes the tutorials are written in a rigorous mathematical language rather than friendly one, sometimes the statements aren't clear enough, and sometimes the tutorials are written assuming that the reader has the sufficient knowledge to understand the math and logic behind the problem, I'm wondering, how is that supposed to help the beginners or the newcomers ?

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By Murk, history, 6 years ago, In English

I don't know how to use <bits/stdc++.h> with clion so I could make it visible to the visual studio compiler I configured, can anyone help on that ?

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